The liberal arts 360—if you go to a small liberal arts school and don’t live under a rock, you are assuredly familiar with this phrase. For the uninitiated, it refers to the vital act of scanning the people around you in the coffee shop, library, airport, or whatever before you begin to gossip or talk about someone with your friends to ensure they or their friends aren’t in the vicinity. Failing to do the liberal arts 360 can have disastrous consequences, and it is a move I’m sure you will have perfected in no time.
But there is another phenomenon plaguing our society, one that is untenable for small liberal arts campuses everywhere: ghosting. We generally think of ghosting as something that happens through texts, usually in the “talking phase” of a situationship. Yet ghosting can (and does) happen in real life and can (and does) happen in friendships and even with those random acquaintances you had a conversation with that one time.
Let’s be honest, I think we’ve all ghosted someone at one time or another, and sometimes it’s a necessary evil. I’m not here to try to convince you that we need to stop ghosting. I’ll leave that to the boomers and Gen X’rs who are convinced we don’t know how to interact with people and that interpersonal skills are dying before their eyes.
I am here to say that ghosting on a small college campus presents a unique set of problems that literally cannot be avoided. As soon as you hope not to see someone, they start cropping up everywhere: they have the same study spot, gym schedule, or just always seem to be crossing your path. Ghosting, in the sense of cutting off all contact and never interacting with that person again, is impossible on small college campuses.
So, instead, we resort to a variety of antics. Some things I’ve experienced, seen, and heard about include but are not limited to: crossing to the other side of the street, actively (and obviously) side texting an entire interaction, pretending not to notice someone when they are actively in your line of sight, going through fake pleasantries you both know are lies, and making eye contact before aggressively starting at your shoes. None of these strategies work, and the only thing worse than these childish attempts is that you both see straight through them.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than putting on an exhausting façade that just makes things more awkward for both parties, we need to learn how to be normal. Revolutionary, right? We all need to be adult enough to accept that not every relationship, friendship, whatever works out—and that’s OK. Not every person is going to get along with every other person. But when you’ve reached that point, and you’re on a small campus where you are inevitably going to share space, and god forbid, classes or even friends, you need to be able to see each other and just keep walking straight past each other.